Lessons

School's started for about a month and school work's finally on track. I mean, there's finally story books to read every night, homework and spelling! I know, I need more time to adjust. While Singapore parents will be doing the opposite, complaining of too much homework, tests and stuff, I find the pace here ridiculously slow and relaxed. In the first week, we were kind of surprised that KK never brought home a timetable. Grade 1 is the equivalent of Primary 1 so it's time for serious learning, right? So what are they doing everyday? I pushed Hubby to ask his teacher for a timetable and her reply was she'll "do up one". Huh?



My Singaporean kiasu-ism is not appeased even when KK brought back homework. He's given 1 week to complete it (so long!) and it's so easy. Just a word search puzzle of about 10 new words and copying each new word 3 times in the workbook. Luckily, there's also spelling every week of those new words. For his spelling last week, Hubby has been patiently practising with him and he scored a perfect score during the test.



This year, we decided to start KK on some ECA. One of them is tennis lessons, held in his school during lunch play time. We figured out he'll be running himself silly at the playground anyway, so might as well let him use this time to pick up a sport. The first lesson, we all forgotten about it. The second lesson, Hubby had specifically reminded KK in the morning and also informed his teacher. He's supposed to make his own way to the indoor gym for the lesson but Hubby was still worried he'll forget, so he made his way to the school at 1.30pm. Sure enough, our dear son was running around the playground when he found him. When he came home that day, KK told us that he enjoyed the lesson and looked forward to next week's lesson.



The other thing we started for him and XX is recreational gymnastics. This is another area we want to expose the kids to - one for exercise and the other, as an outlet to exhaust their boundless energy. We can see from the first few lessons that while KK is active, he is not strong. His arm muscles especially needs more training to do those handstands and parallel bar exercises.



XX is even worse. I realised he's not very agile nor brave compared to the other kids. He's slightly pudgy so that makes him more clumsy. He only likes to jump and bounce and refuses to try those crawling, hanging and somersault activities. For XX, gymnastics lessons is also his first exposure to participating in group play. Initially he was shy but I can see that now he's enjoying the song and dance at the beginning and the end of the lesson. It makes my heart smile when I see him trying to follow the actions and sing along. He's also getting used to listening and following instructions from people other than his parents.



Here's a photo of XX in the gym class. Will try to upload a video when I've edited it.







We also started KK on Chinese lessons every Saturday. This enrichment class was unplanned for and only came about when a friend informed us of this Victorian School of Languages offering lessons for only $55 per year! Since the fees were so reasonable and the location not too far away from our place, we signed KK up for additional exposure to the Chinese Language. He's only been to 2 lessons but he now knows the 4 sounds (声调) of Hanyu Pinyin and another Chinese song (三只老虎) besides Happy Birthday. That's a big enough improvement for me....:-)